How the Crimes Happened, my most recent collection, includes a set of four poems written during my Paradise Lost odyssey. This is the first of that set. In it, I tried to deal with the very peculiar concept of geography that is a large part of Milton's poem.

The Fall

Dawn Potter

The Fiend thought of the Stairs as a sort of emergency ladder

descending from the firmament like Rapunzel’s braid,

mysterious and glittering, and only occasionally useful

(since God yanked them up as the spirit moved him),

though when operational they worked more or less

like an escalator, sweeping swarms of pintucked angels

grandly into the celestial ballroom, for who would expect

angels to climb hand over hand up a hairy ladder,

panting and sweating like ordinary princes?

At the marge of the Stairs lapped an opalescent sea,

a gulf of liquid pearl, each wave as sluggish as polenta

on the boil, and over it sailed alabaster barges weighed down

with seraphim on tour, though, as he might have expected,

no one waved when he coasted by. For some reason

God had let down the Stairs that day, whether to dare

his enemy to easy ascent or to aggravate his sad exclusion

from the party, who could tell? But as it happened,

the Fiend had other fish to fry.

For the Stairs descended, through a film of sea,

to that playhouse of angels, Earth, toy paradise of trees

and fruit and docile tigers, patient as sleep beneath the slow

ocean ripple; and the Fiend, folding his wings and halting

at the fulcrum of the golden Stairs scaling both Heaven and Earth,

looked with wonder at the sudden view of all this world,

like a climber who bursts from a gnarled, branchy darkness

to find, at one instant, the map of the forest spread before him—

a feast of lakes, rivers, sun-struck glades—and above him

the sky, the sky, the sky! And at sight of such beauty,

the Fiend was seized by joy and discontent, heartrending

in near equal portion, and was stymied for a moment

from his purpose, despite his malice, lingering to scrutinize

the canopy of shade and light, until, with some reluctance,

he shook out his heavy wings and leaped down

through the slow-running sea, down the broad Stairs

toward Earth, falling like Alice through the pure air, past star

after star, bright island worlds, though he never paused

to ask who dwelt there in such happy ignorance.